The Explorer

by James Smythe

  Only I know that it isn’t a fault, that we were never meant to turn around. I know everything, because here, in the lining, I am almost omnipotent. I have seen things I shouldn’t have seen, and I know. The ship wasn’t meant to turn around: we were meant to carry on into nothingness, drifting into space, going – yes – further than any man had ever gone before, but with no chance of return or reprieve. You follow coincidence to its natural conclusion, that message isn’t a fault, or a chance warning. We were meant to see it. It was meant for us. I look at the string of numbers, straining to see them with my eyesight how it is, but able to read them because I can remember them so clearly, so indelibly printed onto the back of my eyelids, or somewhere deep inside my brain as they are. I can remember them, and I laugh at their purpose, and I slip off and fantasize – not dream – because this is the lining, and I am still alone, and nothing can change that.

  When he’s asleep I go and look at what he has looked at; and I look further. I look past the computers and the screens at out there, at space. The stars are gone. It’s pitch black out there, total darkness. Nothingness.

  Whatever the number is, it is this. This is it. It is nothing.

  2

  Here is what might have been.

  The first bed to hiss open stays shut until it’s meant to open, because there is no hand of a stray Cormac to open it, to yank it wide in a desperate act of self-preservation. Arlen steps out, dripping wet, groggy, sweat all over him, running down his beard. He dries himself and turns the ship on, lighting the rooms, and then starts running diagnostic programs. He sings to himself, because that’s the sort of person that Arlen was: he sang a lot. He makes sure that the ship is safe for the rest of us, and then greets us as our beds open and we all drift out. He steadies us until we get to the shower, and then he leaves us as we say hello to each other, laugh at the fact we’re all in our underwear, all soaking wet. I stand next to Emmy and we don’t really look at each other, because there’s bad blood there, still – and because she knows about Elena. She knows how much I loved her, how much I wanted to make it work with her. She’ll say something at some point, but now is not the time.

  When we’re showered and dressed – in our identical jumpsuits, slightly different colours on the badges like some prototypical sci-fi TV show – we each start our jobs, checking we’ve got everything we need. Guy runs more diagnostics; Quinn sits in the cockpit, reads all the readouts and checks they’re fine; Wanda resets the beds, setting the water to drain, starting their cleaning cycle; Emmy feels our pulses, one by one, and takes our blood pressures; and I sit at the computer and boot it up, and start writing something, my first entry. We’ve just woken up, I type, and it feels amazing. I decide to leave Elena out of this, because I’ve got a job to do, and it’s important that I do it. Elena will always be a part of me, but she’s gone, and this is now. It’s important – and that’s not to demean her, God no, but this is important for humanity. I have to carry on. I have to be strong.

  We gather for the broadcast and greet home, and tell them what it’s like. It’s televised, beamed to hundreds of countries. Arlen does most of the talking, because he’s the elder statesman, with his beard and his vitality and his healthy heart. He jokes about the rest of us, says that we’re still finding our feet, and then he drifts upwards, out of shot. It’s a gag, but we all think it works, that it’ll play well back home. Who are the audience? It’s the kids. It’s the children, cross-legged on the floor in front of their TV sets, smiling at us, putting our faces on their walls. When the broadcast is done we all gather and chat, and eat our first meal on the ship, processed bars still, Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and McRibs, but we revel in how they taste, because they’re an experience that we’re having independent of everybody else in the world. I say that, and Quinn asks if we can even say that up here. Can we even say in the whole world when we’re no longer there? he asks, and we ponder it, because he has a point. In the universe? I ask, tentatively, as we agree that it’s better, for the best. We’re part of something bigger.

  We do our jobs. Wanda goes on a walk with some of the friends she’s made amongst her crewmates, and she never feels guilt. She’s constantly happy, so awed at being in space when she’s still so young. Who gets this opportunity? she asks, and we say, Well, you do. You deserve it. She blushes. She walks outside the ship and finds the rush of it incredible, and we all want our turn. Next time we stop, Guy says, the rest of you can try. Guy is hard and quiet, but we trust him, because he knows more about how this all works than the rest of us. We listen to him when he tells us what to do, and we do our jobs. We write and speak to home, and they send messages back, and everything is amazing. One day, Emmy sits me down. We should talk, she says, and she asks me about Elena, lets me know that she’s aware what happened. You can talk to me, she says; just because of what happened between us doesn’t mean we’re not friends. So I tell her everything: about how it happened, why it happened. I tell her about my guilt and she listens to me, and I weep into her shoulder and watch as my tears, which are droplets on my cheek, thick and salty, drift away from my face and into the air to be sucked up by the vacuum pumps in the air filtration system.

  We gather around to watch the fuel tick from 52% to 51%, and when it does the ship hums and grinds, and we watch as we turn and start heading back home. We cheer when it does it, because we’ve reached the peak, the furthest point ever. We’ve seen space. We shoot a pod from the ship, a collection of flags of all the countries united in this project, and it unfurls, and there’s the money shot: one giant, unified flag, not fluttering apart from in our wake, square and blunt against the nothingness of space, and it flits off as we move, there for eternity, to drift.

  We land in the sea, the Atlantic, the coast of Ireland. It wasn’t expected, but was nearly impossible to predict. We knew it would be a water landing; that was part of Arlen’s training. We would be coming in so hot we had no other choice. The camera crews sprint to catch us as we disembark, the craft steaming in the water as the door hisses open and we wave, one by one. They cheer our names. Quinn and Emmy are together, and we all know about it, but we’re happy for them. Quinn asks if I care; he didn’t want it to upset me, because of Elena. I have been open with them all. I’m fine, I told him. They do articles and interviews in glossy magazines, holding hands, talking about the future, about kids, a wedding. I do interviews that are more serious. I write my final article, then get a book deal, high six figures, and it’s an easy write. There’s a chapter on Elena, on the circumstances heading into the trip, because I argued blind that she was key to my mindset, that she was totally important. Without her in there, there was no book. The publisher liked it. Human tragedy sells. It gave the book a personal touch. I don’t win the Pulitzer, but who cares, right? Instead I keep writing, and I write a novel, a pulpy, sci-fi thing about a man who is trapped in a perpetual loop, a time loop, like so many other sci-fi stories wrenched from the back of magazines – there are no original ideas, not any more – but this one is more human, or trying to be. I write that and it sells pretty well, and they turn it into a movie and they cast it, and the Cormac isn’t the star and it makes a bit of money and I’m set, because I invest, and I meet a woman, but she looks just like Elena sometimes, and in the light she looks like Emmy, and I sometimes confuse her with them, because her name is Emily, and it’s so easy to get these things confused.

  When I die, my obituary calls me a writer and an explorer. That’s all I ever wanted, I think.

  My fantasies always involve other women; never Elena. I can’t picture her there when I really think about getting home, because she’s gone, and I killed her – or, near as – and nothing I can dream of can change that, not really.

  3

  The beeping stops in the cabin, and that’s enough to wake me, just the cessation of that noise. He’s asleep, so I sneak out. How quickly you collapse: he’s stopped shaving, stopped caring. I don’t remember showering this little. When there were people on t
he ship, I had one a day. He hasn’t, not since Emmy was put away. I’ll bet he stinks. I know I do.

  I shower myself, and shit, and shave. I decide that, even though I’m falling apart, I can do it with dignity. He doesn’t know how good he’s got it. I eat, and take the pills, which I barely notice now, and I sit at the computer and know what’s going to be there, because I’m already thinking it. He’s still writing the blog entries, Cormac; he’s charting what he’s done that day, his thoughts. They’re not worth reading, because he’s so naive, so clueless.

  Instead, I try to work out how this ends. I shut my eyes and try to picture that final scene of my life, as I drifted into space. I remember feeling like somebody was holding me: maybe that was me? Maybe the me now saves the me then? Maybe I tried but failed? I should be more diligent. Maybe I’m meant to save him, and maybe there’ll be a DARPA-funded craft only a few hundred klicks back, and maybe they’ll grab him and take him home and patch him up and maybe give him his life back.

  I know that they won’t. Which means, the best I can hope for is to stop me coming back here again. Because this – reliving these memories, this pain, this confusion – it’s not something that I would wish on my worst enemy.

  I watch Cormac open a bottle of champagne, and I watch as the froth dances around the cabin, and he floats with a straw and hoovers it up, giggling, the bubbles and alcohol going to his head. He’s drunk within seconds. I remember this. He goes to the computer and starts hammering the buttons, and he messages home, even though all he gets is static.

  ‘I miss her,’ he says into the microphone, ‘and I want to come home, because I’m so alone and this is so unfair, and this is no way to die. It’s going to take so long, still. I can’t take this long.’ I remember this. He tells the computer that he’s going to end it, and he takes a thin shard of plastic from the medicine box and holds it against his wrists. He’s still broadcasting to the static. ‘You can all see it,’ he says. ‘You can all see how much pain I’m in, right? Because they’re all dead, every single one of them. Elena!’ It’s a cry. From here, if it didn’t sting, I’d almost think it was pathetic. He can’t go through with it, because he’s too weak. There’s nothing there: the ability to kill himself is wholly absent from him. He cries instead, and drops everything, and cleans up after himself, and then he drunkenly tries to sort out the ship’s course, hammering the keys, opening software he doesn’t understand. I remember all of this. When he finally gives up it’s to go to bed: he slides into the open-front coffin and shuts his eyes, and I watch until he stops murmuring, then sneak out of the lining. At the computer I can see that his hammering has been useless, ineffectual. He doesn’t know that. Tomorrow, he’ll see that the fuel is rapidly burning itself out, and he’ll think it’s because of something that he did.

  I inject him with the final dose of sedative and watch him slump when I put gravity back on. I suit up, tie myself a security line, take the spare tool with me. I cling to the outside of the ship, and I open the panel that controls the engines and stare at the wires. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I grab a thin blue wire and pull at it. It feels like enough. I know that when I go inside and start the engines again, the fuel will be burning faster; that the blue wire somehow controls the accelerant, or the speed with which the fuel is fed into the engines, and that the ship will gradually get faster and burn more and more of it as it goes.

  I stay outside and watch space until the air in the capsule starts to run out. It’s still calm.

  He notices that it’s going down faster than it ought to, that the fuel supply is ticking quickly. He watches out of the Bubble at the nothing, and he tries to discover what’s making it happen.

  ‘Are we going faster?’ he asks aloud, which we are, of course, because that’s how the fuel is going so quickly. ‘Holy shit.’ He keeps reading the manuals over and over, and searching the database, trying to find anything that can point the way for him. I feel sorry for him, because I remember how this felt, and now know why it’s happened. He sits and watches the numbers as they tick over, and he panics when the numbers and the beeping starts. It doesn’t herald the change in fuel content, but it seems related. Coincidence, he will start to fathom. He writes something, and leaves it on the screen, unfinished, it seems. It’s the first piece he hasn’t bothered to send.

  That night, as he sleeps, I leave the lining to read it. It’s normal: an outpouring of emotions, self-pitying and terrifying to read. It’s my voice, but nothing like I remember it.

  I’m trying to keep myself stable, and constant, and normal, but I’ve been here so long I can’t even remember what that feels like. In the daytime, I treat everything like I should: I keep my spirits up, and I look out of the Bubble, and I wonder where the stars have gone; and I try to fix this, to turn the ship around, but I know it’s all useless. I’m so far out there will be no getting home: maybe I could make it to the Moon before I choked and died from lack of oxygen, from the power giving way, from the fuel running out, but then, what’s the point? They’ll see something in their telescopes and find me months after I’ve died, drifting and rotting and boneless. What will a lack of oxygen do to the body? Will it preserve it? Will it make everything worse?

  Maybe I’m better to be out here, alone, and drifting. Maybe I’m better off dying when my time comes. They’ll remember me at home, just like Guy said that they would. They’ll remember us all. I try to stay chipper in the days, because otherwise I should just end it all, here and now. But at night, before I sleep, it sounds like the ship is creaking, and it feels like I’m being watched, and the watching eyes are just thinking, End it, Cormac. End it.

  He’s all talk.

  I’d forgotten about being actually alone. For the last – how long has it been? – I’ve had the rest of the crew, and Cormac, all doing things I didn’t necessarily see the first time around, managing to surprise me, to confuse me. I’ve been alone but never lonely, not really. Now I am. Cormac isn’t real company. I know what he’s doing, just as the left arm knows where the right is. He doesn’t do what I want when I want. He sits at the computer and mopes, and watches the videos over and over. He focuses on that video of Emmy, talking to him, addressing him like they were strangers.

  ‘I did my training in Brisbane and Sydney,’ she says, to the camera, cool and delivered like we were taught during our training, preparing us for the media interviews we did before we left. They told us that they would book us more for when we returned, fill our calendars, put that training to good use. She reels it off to camera like she would for anybody, but Cormac reads it as something for him, personal insight. She’s repeated her story thousands of times before, in every interview – press or job – that she’s ever done. Cormac is blind to it; blind to her.

  He switches all the lights off, all over the ship. Everything, room by room, goes dark, apart from the main cabin, lit by the neon coming from the computer screens and HUDs. He sits in Quinn’s chair and pretends to be pilot, but I have to strain to see him, even more now it’s so dark; and he talks himself through rescue attempts, speaking them aloud, reciting them. This much trauma – to have your wife die, then to see your friends die, one by one, not knowing that (you) Guy was to blame for it all, or near as damn it – this much trauma can only fuck with you. I thought I was totally holding it together. I thought – hindsight being a wonderful thing – that I was an exemplary example of a stranded astronaut. If they managed to retrieve the black box, it would stand testament to my skills and mental fortitude.

  We both watch the numbers on the screen, although I can barely see them from here – a fuzz of red faux-LED, where the distinct shapes – 1s, 4s – make sense, but the rest require fathoming. We’re on 39% fuel, 94% piezoelectric. Nobody can ever claim to having felt déjà vu until they watched the same thing, the exact same thing, for the second time in their life, waiting for the exact same moment where the numbers tick down, 39 to 38. Cormac watches and waits, and it finally happens. He doesn’t look satisfie
d, or dismayed; he just looks blank. He opens a file on an adjacent screen, types something, brings up a stopwatch and sets it off; and he watches the numbers fly on that screen as well. He just sits and counts. I decide to sleep, so I strap myself down further towards the back of the ship – in case he hears me, if I snore, or cough, or anything. I dream about myself in space, the way it ended, spinning, alone, everything exploding, both the ship and myself, because that’s what happened in the pressure of that vacuum; and I dream of the thick blackness that engulfed me. In the dream, it swallows me over and over.

  I wake shaking, sweating. I take another painkiller, dry swallowing it, gulping it down with saliva from my mouth, and I lie back and put my hand on my heart, because it’s racing, thudding like it wants to come out of my chest. Through my paltry flesh, it feels like it’s going to split my ribs.

  ‘Please,’ I say, because I don’t want to die, not now. ‘Please.’ Cormac is asleep, finally; draped over the captain’s chair, head lolled to the side. I leave the lining, still holding my chest, wrapping my right arm across to my left as if it will hold my body together. I don’t know what’s happening, but I pull myself to the medicine cabinet, open it as quietly as I can, and it isn’t until I’m standing over it, using my other arm to stop the contents drifting everywhere, that I realize the pain has gone, that I was just dreaming. I’m alive, still, and my heart is racing, but I’m fine.

  Who am I kidding? I’m not fine.

  In the bathroom, as Cormac’s head lolls backwards in the cockpit, I examine myself again. Another tooth, but that’s to be expected. I crick both my knees, having the room to extend, and listen as the bone in them grinds against itself. They told us that the cartilage would be the first thing to go. It’s a wonder I’m not in more pain. (Then I remember the painkillers, strong enough to dope a horse, and I’m no horse.) I look at the scar on my leg, the others on my back, and I wonder how long the bone in my leg took to heal here, where bones don’t work the way they should, where the body isn’t right? If I had to put pressure on it for any real amount of time, sans self-medication, would it hurt? Would it even work properly? I try to feel the bone through my skin, and it seems fine: but I can’t believe that it is.